I was asked to do a presentation on web stuff so I had to think of a topic that would benefit most of the people listening. I get a lot of questions about Twitter, so I thought I would give my top 8 tips on how to optimise Twitter for Google.

A good description is key as it tells everyone in a very short time what you do or who you are so it should include the keywords you want to be found for. Here’s my twitter description: Website Design Glasgow, Websites, Content Management Systems, Search Engine Optimisation & Social Media Marketing, Branding, Flash & Mobile Applications.

The first 25-40 characters should contain your keywords to be effective in Google searches but make sure it still reads well for your audience.

Link to your own twitter profile where you can. For example if you are getting new business cards made put it in the contact details part, but only if you intend to keep it up. Otherwise a dead page won’t look good to your prospect.

Tweet often, but please make sure it’s relevant, don’t tweet for tweets sake, also try to be as current as possible, think daily news of your industry, client issues or resources for your prospects, not what you had for breakfast, well unless you are a celebraty and your promoting something like healthy eating.

The more followers you have the bigger the boost to your ranking in Google for your Twitter account, but beware of following people, you know you don’t have to follow them because they followed you. Make sure you keep the quality high on who you essentially are giving a “I like this person”. Just in case you are interested you can find my twitter account here for Alan Fair Web Design Glasgow.

Use a URL that’s been shortened like www.bit.ly, http://goo.gl/ or http://tinyurl.com/ this basically takes a long URL that you have and gives it a code to make it as short as possible. It also ensures you have more characters to type on your tweet with so it’s worth the extra effort.

Don’t spend more than 1-2 hours a week maximum. If you have a clear Twitter strategy it should only take a few minutes each tweet, so even if you do a lot it shouldn’t take a bite out your week to get on with business.

Here’s a secret one most people don’t know about, make sure that the image on your profile has its filename edited to include your most important keyword or two, but don’t make it too long Google probably won’t like that. For example I have web-design-glasgow-alan-fair.jpg I would say that’s about as long as it should be. Don’t foget it needs to at least be descriptive of the image, so think very carefully about what you call it and what image you put up there.